If you are looking for a free to play browser rts, try War of Legends. The games is published by Jagex makers of Runescape, a company that generally treats its customers well.

War of Legends was also launched at the beginning of April, so I wonder if EA is forcing Lord of Ultima out the door to compete. It's tough to compete with Jagex in the browser game space though. After all, Runescape has something like 6 million players (5 million free, 1 million subscribers).

Not being able to catch up to a veteran is one of the drawbacks of the single server for all players that Eve uses.

Don't know if Lord of Ultima will have more than one server; but competing games like Jagex's War of Legends have multiple servers, with new ones coming always online. If veteran players are dominating the old servers, you can just start up on one of the new.

I've been using Slackware since '96, and I continue to use it in various capacities today. Installing Slackware and playing with it, writing programs for it, was seriously the best thing I ever did for my knowledge of computers and for Unix environments. I have skills that far surpass any of my co-workers or friends, and have often been the only one that could sort out issues with any sort of Unix environment.

I had the same experience, except with the computer science degree I was taking part time.

I ended up getting an A+ in the unix course (my other grades were usually in the B+/A-) range almost strictly from my prior knowledge gained from using Slackware day after day on my desktop.

I even got something like 105% on a midterm after the instructer had to curve it after most of the class bombed.

The only thing that matters is that open standards are implemented, then we all win.

Except for Bill Gates -- he loses.

The answer is crowd-sourcing.

1) Drop input costs to near zero by giving average casual game-player (5 year old to granny) easy Web 2.0 flash game-design api.

2) ???

3) Profit